Consuming Pleasures

Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera

Jennifer Hayward

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184470
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"To be continued..." Whether these words fall at the end of The Empire Strikes Back or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences.

In Consuming Pleasures jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre-one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called, after Wittgenstein, "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, and such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins.

Hayward chooses four texts—Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-46), and the soap operas All My Children (1970-) and One Life to Live (1968-)—to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre, and to analyze the peculiar draw serials have upon their audiences.

Although the serial has enjoyed great marketplace success, traditional literary and social critics have denounced its ties to mass culture, claiming it preys upon passive fans. But Hayward argues that active serial audiences have developed identifiable strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process.

1

Mutual Friends

The Development of the Mass Serial

Please, Sir, can I have some more?

—Dickens, Oliver Twist

The appearance of a new tale by Mr. Dickens is an event of too great importance in the literary world—that part of it, at least, which indulges in fiction—to be passed over without comment... This part is, however, doubtless, by this time in the hands of thousands of delighted readers, and thousands more of eager applicants and candidates are pressing to secure its next perusal. We will not unfairly interfere with their pleasure by giving the slightest insight into the nature of the mysteries wherewith the wizard is at present dealing. We will not even recommend its perusal, as everybody who reads a novel at all is sure to read this without recommendation, and as soon as he can lay his hands upon it. [London Sunday Times, May 8, 1864]

AS IS OBVIOUS from this review of Our Mutual Friend, popular serial novels became phenomena on the level of the O.J. Simpson trial or the first heady season of Twin Peaks. The sheer volume of discourse surrounding such fiction, which mobilized suspense and desire in highly profitable ways, enabled it to change the shape of the novel while creating a new genre that persists across time and technology to the present.

Like later serials, the novel in parts appeared just when a new technology needed to consolidate a mass audience in order to prove its viability. Although the narrative advantages of telling stories over a period of time have been known since storytelling began, the economic advantages became apparent in the 1720s and 1730s, when histories, encyclopedias, the Bible, and similar texts were sold in penny and twopenny parts, and sales boomed in consequence.¹ But “boomed” in an eighteenth-century context means little when compared with sales of later serials. The printing, papermaking, and distribution technologies necessary for cheap mass runs had not yet been invented, and low literacy rates and the concentration of the population in rural rather than urban environments precluded an audience larger than a few thousand per serial run.² In the early nineteenth century, urbanization, higher literacy, and the concept of leisure led to increased demand for reading matter; industrialization made possible a proliferation of consumer goods at lower prices; and transportation technologies, rapidly growing networks of shops (even in small towns), and the growth of advertising permitted the dispersal of these goods throughout the nation and abroad. But mass audiences somehow managed to ignore the page-turning potential of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) and similar serialized works. The market was clearly ripe for a new attraction. Seeing the possibility of greatly increased sales, publishers began to take an active role in the creation of books, commissioning authors and artists to produce a particular nexus of plot, character, and image to satisfy perceived demand.³ Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, commissioned by the publishers Chapman and Hall, will serve to illustrate changes in the production context of fiction.

Stephen Marcus has called Dickens “the first capitalist of literature” in the sense that he worked within apparently adverse conditions to take advantage of new technologies and markets, creating, in effect, an entirely new role for fiction.⁴ In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Robert Patten quotes Oscar Dystel (president and chief executive of Bantam Paperbacks) on the three “key factors” in his development of a successful paperback line: availability of new material, introduction of the rubber plate rotary press, and development of magazine wholesalers as a distribution arm. As Patten points out, parallel factors operated in the Victorian era: a plethora of writers, new technologies, and expanded distribution. And as methods of papermaking, printing, and platemaking increased in efficiency, so did means of transportation. By 1836, a crucial network of wholesale book outlets in the Strand, peddlers, provincial shops, and the royal mail—made possible by the development of paved roads, fast coaches, and eventually the national railway system—had been consolidated. The final task facing early publishers was, then, to develop the newly accessible market for their commodity. By lowering prices, emphasizing illustrations and sensational elements, and increasing variety of both form and content, publishers created readers within the largest demographic groups: the rising middle and working classes, where readers had essentially not existed before.⁵

When Chapman and Hall commissioned a series of sporting stories to accompany sketches by the popular illustrator Robert Seymour, they launched the first true mass-market serial and thus changed the concept of serialization, making it the primary form of publication for the next fifty years.⁶ The first number of the serial fell flat, selling only four hundred parts, perhaps owing to the relative anonymity of its author (at the time, Dickens was twenty-four and known only for his “Sketches by Boz” series). After number 2, the overworked Seymour committed suicide. This event was fortuitous for Dickens (who has since been accused, a little unreasonably, of having impelled the suicide by demanding changes in a sketch) since it left him in virtual control of the project.⁷ A new illustrator, R. W. Buss, was quickly hired to complete number 3. Buss’s drawings were disastrous, Dickens defiant, profits nonexistent. Given this dismal scenario, many publishers might have cut their losses by abandoning the project. Chapman and Hall instead forced Dickens to accept a reduced rate of 10 shillings per installment and prefaced the third number as follows:

We announced in our last, that the ensuing Numbers of the Pickwick Papers, would appear in an improved form: and we now beg to call the attention of our readers to the fulfillment of our promise.

Acting upon a suggestion which has been made to them from various influential quarters, the Publishers have determined to increase the quantity of Letter Press in every monthly part, and to diminish the number of Plates. It will be seen that the present number contains eight additional pages of closely-printed matter, and two engravings on steel, from designs by Mr. Buss—a gentleman already well known to the Public, as a very humorous and talented artist.

This alteration in the plan of the work entails upon the Publishers a considerable expense, which nothing but a large circulation would justify them in incurring. They are happy to have it in their power to state, that the rapid sale of the two first numbers, and the daily-increasing demand for this Periodical, enables them to acknowledge the patronage of the Public, in a way which they hope will be deemed most acceptable. [reproduced in Waugh, 24]

What had actually happened was that all but two of Buss’s prints were, as he himself put it, too “wretched” to be used, and therefore text had to be substituted. Faced with the production reality of negative profits, a fledgling writer, and an incompetent illustrator, the publishers created a trompe l’oeil facade. And more important for my purposes, they chose to do so by purporting to respond to “a suggestion . . . from various influential quarters,” thus highlighting a defining quality of serial fiction: its ability to (at least pretend to) respond to its audience while the narrative is still in the process of development. Chapman and Hall also demonstrated ingenuity in disposing of their piles of unsold monthly parts. Since sales in the provinces had been negligible, they sent the parts to provincial booksellers without charging in advance, telling the booksellers to sell on consignment and simply return the numbers not disposed of. In the first month, 1,450 of 1,500 copies were returned, but within a few months the method was a huge success, establishing an essential new distribution system (Patten 66).

Concurrently with these marketing advances, Dickens transformed the narrative from a standard series of bumbling sportsmen’s sketches into a picaresque based in London but depicting urban infiltration of the country. The fifth number introduced a working-class character, Sam Weller, and his father. Audiences responded well to Dickens’s humorous but sympathetic textual representation of these urban characters. Sales soared after Sam appeared on the scene, and readers apparently wrote Dickens to “counsel him to develop the character largely—to the utmost.”⁸ And Dickens, already showing the true responsiveness to his audience that contrasts so markedly with the simulated responsiveness of Chapman and Hall, answered by making Sam central to the Pickwick adventures.

The author’s and publishers’ narrative, advertising, and distribution techniques, innovative from an entrepreneurial standpoint, proved overwhelmingly successful. By number 5, Pickwick’s circulation had increased to forty thousand per number, where it stayed throughout the run. As Norman N. Feltes is careful to stress in his Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, this success is generally attributed to literary genius, lucky accident, and marketing ability, combining to explode upon the literary world. But, Feltes argues, the historical processes that shaped and determined the material production of Pickwick Papers are as important as “genius, luck, and the shrewdness of Chapman and Hall” (3). The series’ success certainly depended on a combination of perfect timing, insight into the potential of advertising, Dickens’s great comic skill and ability to reflect his audience, and fine-tuning of the narrative to respond to audience desire. But all these factors could not have arisen simultaneously without the particular nexus of economic, technological, and ideological conditions existent in the 1830s.

Of course, this revolution in the production and distribution of narrative did not go unchallenged. From early in Dickens’s career, reviewers formed an important part of the serial equation. As Kathleen Tillotson notes (1954), the era of Pickwick marks the beginning of serious criticism of novels. Thus the genre as a whole was still considered artistically and morally suspect, which meant that early reviewers were especially reluctant to acknowledge serials, the dregs of this debased genre, as worthy of notice. In addition to the reasons already noted for the prejudice against serials, a more covert cause was that, as Tillotson points out, “reviewers were not quite disinterested; part-issue put them in a difficulty. If they reviewed the novel during publication, they risked premature judgment; if they waited for completion, their criticism might well be superfluous” (39). The economically driven need to review the highly popular and profitable serials effectively forced reviewers into the reading community not as experts but as equal participants. On the other hand, reviewers’ livelihood obviously depended on the reading public’s continued interest in serials. Therefore their relation to the new form was bound to be ambivalent at best. The involuntary suspension of reviewers’ critical superiority seems to have produced considerable anxiety amongst critics of the new genre; many reviewers for upper-class quarterlies refused to review serials at all.

Critics tended to reflect the agenda of the type of periodical (patrician or reformist, elitist or popular) for which they wrote and consequently chose very different analogies and metaphors to describe the serial phenomenon. In addition to imposing the discourse of addiction on serials, for example, upper-class critics described serial fiction in industrial terms. In 1839, two years after the run of Pickwick and concurrently with that of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, the conservative Quarterly Review directly parallels the new form of fiction with the system of industrial labor in its review of Oliver Twist: “The works of Boz come out in numbers, suited to this age of division of labour, cheap and not too long ... in fact, Boz is the only work which the superficial acres of type called newspaper leave the human race time to peruse.”⁹ As late as 1843, after Dickens was an acknowledged literary phenomenon, serialization still aroused protest and controversy. For example, in that year the Quarterly Review continued its attack by grimly congratulating itself (at least sixty years too soon, as it happens) on the early demise not only of individual serialized novels but of the serial as a mode of publication. Of Dickens, the reviewer says, “His longer works owe much, we are afraid, much of their popularity to their having been published in numbers. ... we are inclined to predict of works of this style both in England and France (where the manufacture is flourishing on a very intensive and somewhat profligate scale) that an ephemeral popularity will be followed by early oblivion” (71 [March 1843]: 504). The industrial metaphors continue here: like the earlier use of “division of labour,” “manufacture” again establishes the connection between mass-produced fiction and the Industrial Revolution while also imposing an implicit lower-class coding on serials; “profligate” adds a suggestion of eventual (and well-deserved) ruin, as well as absence of the capitalist virtues of thrift and investment. Just as manufacturer’s money carried a stigma, so manufacture of fiction implied—and still implies—absence of artistic value.

Despite their anxieties over the form, by the mid-1840s most reviewers were forced to admit that serialized fiction was defiantly healthy, on the agenda for at least a few more runs to come. Periodicals as disparate as the upper-class North British Review and the working-class Sun cite (with fury or with approbation) the serial’s ability to transform readers’ attitudes. In 1845, the North British Review moves beyond earlier predictions of the form’s demise to bemoan its moral repercussions. The reviewer delivers a sermon on the evils of installment fiction, one worth quoting at length since it summarizes mid-century arguments against the form. After an extensive laundry list of Dickens’s faults, the review concludes:

The form of publication of Mr. Dickens’s works must be attended with bad consequences. The reading of a novel is not now the undertaking it once was, a thing to be done occasionally on holiday and almost by stealth. . . . Useful as a certain amount of novel reading may be, this [serialization] is not the right way to indulge in it. It is not a mere healthy recreation like a match at cricket, a lively conversation, or a game at backgammon. It throws us into a state of unreal excitement, a trance, a dream, which we should be allowed to dream out, and then be sent back to the atmosphere of reality again, cured by our brief surfeit of the desire to indulge again soon in the same delirium of feverish interest. But now our dreams are mingled with our daily business. ... the new number of Dickens, or Lever, or Warren . . . absorb[s] the energies which, after the daily task, might be usefully employed in the search after wholesome knowledge. [3 (May 1845): 85]

This lambasting reveals the reviewer’s central assumptions. Novel reading may be “useful,” but only if it is done by stealth so as not to interfere with the utilitarian accumulation of knowledge and so as to preserve the strict separation of daily business and unconscious release. As so often with serials, it is their disruption of boundaries—between fiction and reality, dream and business, manly sport and womanly indulgence—that really seems to upset the reviewer. He is not alone in expressing this fear, one echoing Arnold’s and other clergymen’s sermons, numerous letters to the press, and an almost infinite amount of more recent criticism of mass audiences, of which a representative example (to be discussed in the final chapter) is the pervasive perception of soap opera fans as unable to separate character from actor, fiction from reality.

As we will see shortly, a number of critics from cheap newspapers such as News of the World praised this interpellation of fiction and “real life”; however, upper-class critics such as Arnold and the reviewer above found it profoundly disturbing, seeing particular danger in serials’ unprecedented intersections with the rhythms of everyday life. Later, conservative critics turned to explicit economic analogy to emphasize the threat posed by the serial habit. In 1851, the Prospective Review discusses Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Pendennis, two serial bildungsroman running simultaneously. The review gravely informs readers that “the serial tale ... is probably the lowest artistic form yet invented. ... In it, wealth is too often wasted in reckless and riotous profusion, and poverty is concealed by mere superficial variety, caricature, violence, and confused bustle.”¹⁰ Compare this upper class use of “wealth” and “poverty” as metaphors for literary content and structure with the Working Man’s Friend, which just a year later appropriates economics for the purpose of explicit social critique, arguing that Dickens is universally read because poverty, “the common lot and natural birthright of the masses, is itself a bond of communion with the many. In the depths of this poverty the author of the Pickwick Papers has discovered his wealth” (Aug. 21, 1852, 326). Poverty becomes here not a metaphorical but an actual condition. Wealth, on the other hand, as a much less likely reality for most of this reviewer’s audience, is apotheosized into metaphor, although certainly Dickens’s huge profits are implied as well.

Early in Dickens’s career, then, the more expensive quarterlies attempted to conceptualize the serial phenomenon in material terms by means of familiar, disparaging models of addiction and industrial production. Clearly these models do have interesting reverberations with regard to serials, which are inseparable from the system of production that impels them and which may insert themselves into the patterns of our daily lives in ways that resemble addiction. Equally clearly, our present ways of thinking about and perhaps even of using mass culture have been shaped by the persistent metaphors of addiction and industrial manufacture applied to mass culture in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Terry Lovell notes in Consuming Fiction, panicked critique of new cultural forms is a time-honored tradition. She cites eighteenth-century terror of the novel’s potential effects on morals and reading practices: “The moral panic it occasioned in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was merely the first of a series which occurred whenever a new cultural commodity made its debut. It was repeated in very similar terms in the twentieth century over cinema and then television, both of which were attacked as culturally debased and as tending to corrupt” (8). The period Lovell discusses here, 1770 to 1810, was dominated by the Gothic craze and also saw the rise of the novel as commodity. By the time the serial appeared, new fears surrounding industrialization joined to the traditional moral panic Lovell describes to create new terms of critique for the novel.

By the 1850s, installment fiction had become economically entrenched in the system of fiction production. Since there was no point in continuing to slam an undeniably thriving mode of publication, debate as to the origins and value of the serial form began to decrease, while arguments as to the role of fiction in general, and the...